No one's going to heckle baritone opera singer Roberto Perlas Gomez during John Adams' “The Death of Klinghoffer.”

“For the entire second act, I'm holding an AK-47,” he said.

Gomez is one of four terrorists who commandeers the Achille Lauro cruise ship in the new Long Beach Opera production. The real-life incident made worldwide headlines in 1985 when Palestinians found an attention-grabbing way to underscore the plight of their people. They demanded the release of prisoners held in Israeli custody. One passenger, the elderly and handicapped Leon Klinghoffer, was executed perhaps foremost because he was Jewish.

“The other terrorists tend to have music that's a bit more philosophical,” Gomez said, “but the Rambo music – Rambo, the character I'm portraying – is brutal. He fits the real stereotype of an angry individual who sees himself as being wronged. I'm not making any judgments on that, but this character obviously (is) trying to get revenge on the world.

“It's really, really ugly, brutal language.” (From the libretto by Alice Goodman: Not for one day/ Will your children miss you./ I hear a belly growl;/ The voice of your soul./ Go on then, kneel,/ Beg me to permit/ You something to eat/) “The first time I read through it I thought to myself, Andreas (Mitisek, the company's artistic director) wants me to learn this? And I really got sick!”

He laughed at the memory of that first encounter with the text.

If it's any consolation, Gomez also sings the part of the First Officer, asking that passengers – “Parents, silence your children” – remain calm.

FROM PAVAROTTI TO NIXON

Gomez is hardly a stranger to Long Beach Opera. He has had parts in “Akhnaten,” “Motezuma,” “The Emperor of Atlantis,” “Cherry Town,” “Die Kluge,” “The Breasts of Tiresias,” “Medea” and John Adams' best known opera, “Nixon in China.” More recently, he performed the title role in the company's “King Gesar,” billed as a “campfire opera,” which took place outdoors near the Queen Mary. It was a curious, demanding piece, with Gomez and Danielle Marcelle Bond the only singers.

“That was,” he said, “probably the most difficult thing I've had to do for Andreas and for Long Beach.”

For some artists, it's pretty much a straight path from childhood dreams to the performing stage. They take singing and dancing lessons as kids and glide up the ladder through high school and college. But for a long time, Gomez was more likely to become a nuclear physicist than a professional singer.

He was 5 when he and his family moved from the Philippines to the United States, and they bounced around in California – Oxnard, Santa Monica, Cerritos – before heading east and bouncing around there for awhile, too.

“I was always really good with math and science growing up,” Gomez said. “So it was just logical for me to go into the sciences and pursue a career that people would consider more of a professional career.”

A career in singing wasn't even a consideration for him.

“But that was also the heyday of (Luciano) Pavarotti, and one Sunday afternoon there was a broadcast of ‘La Gioconda,' from San Francisco, and Pavarotti was there singing ‘Cielo e mar,'” he said. “It was an epiphany.”

For a while, Gomez tried balancing double majors, physics and music.

“There was no way I could commit equal amounts of time to both,” he said. “So I made a choice, and it was music. I've had probably a 30-year career now with it.”

The first contact that Gomez had with Long Beach Opera was in the late 1980s, while still a student at Cal State Northridge. The company's then-director, Michael Milenski, invited him for a small role in Mussorgsky's “Boris Godunov.” It wasn't an auspicious beginning: After a couple of rehearsals, Milenski decided that two or three small parts weren't necessary.

“So I got cut,” Gomez said with a laugh.

A few years went by, Milenski had retired and with Mitisek at the helm – and ready to undertake an abridged version of Wagner's “Ring” cycle – Gomez was again contacted, this time for a bit part in “Götterdämmerung,” and this time he didn't end up on the cutting room floor, so to speak.

Another couple of years passed, and then “Andreas called me up and said, ‘I'm doing “Nixon in China” in Verona, Italy; would you be interested in singing the role of Chou En-lai?' I said sure. So I auditioned for him and the rest is history. They've been using me ever since for a lot of major things.”

Shipshape writing

“The Death of Klinghoffer” is a work that still roils the waters of debate, but at the same time it's gradually sliding from the topical to the historical. Opera fans will be hearing more about it next season when the Metropolitan Opera in New York stages it, which means that it also will be broadcast locally on movie screens as part of the “HD: Live” series. But, as usual, Long Beach Opera is ahead of the curve.

Despite being an emotionally laden story, there isn't a great deal of running around on stage, and there are no car chases or stampedes.

“It's not action in the sense that you have Romeo and Juliet-type scenes,” Gomez said. “We don't have swordplay like that in this piece. But at the same time, there's a lot of interaction between all the characters on stage.”

A large portion of the singing is in the hands of the chorus, which is sort of like a Greek chorus in that it's providing commentary from outside or above the narrative.

“But for the most part,” Gomez said, “when the principals are interacting on stage it's in real time. Even though we're not beating each other up, with the exception of my character – there's not a whole lot of action. Many things are alluded to and take place offstage. I think just from a sensitivity nature that's probably best.”

Apart from Carlisle Floyd, Gomez said that of the late 20th-century composers, it's John Adams who most impresses him.

“He has a style that, even if its minimalist, has an amazing amount of energy to it, the kind of energy that you would find in Rossini or Mozart,” Gomez said. “There's a lot of rhythmic intensity to it, a lot of rhythmic interest, because of his varied measures. I don't think there are more than three or four measures that go by in my Rambo scene where the time signatures are the same.

“That makes it extremely difficult to learn, and sometimes I feel like it's on the edge of coming apart,” he said. “But Andreas is a great conductor, and so we are able to keep it together.”

Having already tackled the part of Chou En-lai in “Nixon in China” certainly helped Gomez prepare for the music in “Klinghoffer.”

“It has an incredible amount of rhythmic vitality and lyricism that's often not found in many 20th-century composers,” he said. “You can carry lines and phrases for a long, long time with his music and with the way he writes.”

Wanted in California

Gomez has performed almost 90 roles.

“I like to tell people,” he said, “that since I've gotten my AARP card (he hits 52 this year), I've forgotten more roles than I can remember.

“But the staples stay with you. You never forget a Marcello or a Barber or a Giovanni or a Leporello; you don't forget ‘Traviatas' – those things that you do over and over tend to stay with you. You can find a ‘La Bohème' pretty much any time. Those roles never go away.”

For the past dozen years, Gomez has lived with his girlfriend in a quiet area of Torrance, so close to Redondo Beach that he could almost reach out and touch it. The location is pretty much ideal because most of the six or seven operas that Gomez appears in each year take place up and down the state.

There are several companies in the Bay Area that only opera aficionados may ever have heard of, such as Livermore Valley Opera and Modesto's Townsend Opera. Then there's San Diego Opera anchoring things down south.

Gomez did an apprenticeship with Costa Mesa's Opera Pacific, a company that unfortunately folded a few years back, and he has had small parts with the Los Angeles Opera.

However, it all has come down to the always adventurous and unpredictable Long Beach Opera.

“Ever since Andreas asked me to do ‘Nixon,' in Verona, Long Beach has really become a big part of my artistic life,” Gomez said. “After ‘Nixon,' he asked me a year later to do ‘Motezuma' and then it was ‘The Emperor of Atlantis' and ‘Die Kluge.'”

“Very challenging. But they're not insignificant,” he said. “They're big pieces that he asks me to do.

“And you go back to those other pieces (for example, “La Traviata” and “The Barber of Seville”) with a different perception. So this has really become a big part of my identity, and the best thing is that it's in my backyard. I can come home at night and sleep in my bed, and it's really great.

“I'm really thankful that Long Beach Opera is here in the area, that I'm singing with them, that they still find things to cast me in. I can't say enough about it.”

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